Tea at Trianon: C. S. Lewis Against the Darkness

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 20, 2023

C. S. Lewis Against the Darkness

From The National Review:

There was a lot to think about. Great Britain had survived eight months of a Nazi bombing campaign against London and other strategic cities, but at the cost of 43,000 civilians killed and 1.1 million homes damaged or destroyed. In April, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, the latest states to be absorbed by Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Europe. In every state controlled by the Nazis, deportations and massacres of Jews became a routine occurrence. In May, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, sending 3.5 million troops across a front stretching 1,800 miles. It was the largest military operation in history, and it caught the murderous communist regime of Joseph Stalin completely off guard. In November, Isoroku Yamamoto, admiral of Japan’s Imperial Navy, issued Top Secret Order No. 1, the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within a month, Japan was at war with the United States.

Amid the chaos and suffering of the Second World War, Lewis began writing a sequel to his first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Perelandra picks up the story of Elwin Ransom as he travels to Venus (Perelandra), a planet that, in biblical terms, has not experienced a fall from divine grace. Ransom’s mission is to prevent a satanic figure from luring an Eve-like character into a fatal temptation. In a letter to his friend Sister Penelope, dated November 9, 1941, Lewis explained what he was attempting:

I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world, a difficult chapter. . . . I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart — she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But if one can get even a fraction of it into words it is worth doing it.

Lewis succeeded beyond his imagination. As James Como argues in Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C. S. Lewis and His Favorite Book, of all Lewis’s books — over 40, in addition to hundreds of essays, poems, lectures, and sermons — no other single work so successfully intertwines his intellectual and imaginative powers, while revealing the breadth and depth of the man himself. Como, professor emeritus of rhetoric and public communication at York College (CUNY) and a leading C. S. Lewis scholar, delivers a profound meditation on the enduring importance of Lewis’s novel: He helps us to recognize our desire for the holy. “The power of Perelandra,” Como writes, “derives from the fact that it offers a convincing portrayal of that Truth for which, knowingly or not, we have always longed.”

Yet Como achieves something more. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Lewis’s corpus, he reveals the connective tissue between the works, uniquely embodied in the epic narrative and resplendent imagery of Perelandra. Even Lewis devotees may be surprised to learn how some of the key themes of the story — the nature of evil, the idolization of the self, the moral law, the significance of human freedom — also manifest themselves in such works as The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Chronicles of Narnia. (Read more.)